Human herpes virus 6 or Epstein–Barr virus were not detected in Guthrie cards from children who later developed leukaemia

Abstract

To investigate if children who later developed acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) were prenatally infected with HHV-6 and/or EBV, Guthrie cards taken at birth were analysed by PCR. Guthrie cards from 54 patients with ALL and 47 healthy controls matched for age and birth place were tested negative for both HHV-6 and EBV DNA. All samples contained amplifiable DNA when tested by HLA-DQ PCR. Our negative findings suggest that childhood ALL is unlikely to be associated with an in utero infection with EBV or HHV-6.

Adenovirus detection in Guthrie cards from paediatric leukaemia cases and controls

“…This was the first description of a very high frequency of viral DNA present in Guthrie cards, and this same group found no other viral DNAs in previous Guthrie card studies (Priftakis et al, 2003;Bogdanovic et al, 2004;Isa et al, 2004;Gustafsson et al, 2006). As AdV DNA was found only in 2 out of 130 leukaemia tumour samples in one report (Kosulin et al, 2007), a hit-and-run mechanism is the only likely possibility.…”

Adenovirus DNA is detected at increased frequency in Guthrie cards from children who develop acute lymphoblastic leukaemia

“…To determine whether a prenatal virus infection could lead to the development of pre-leukaemic cells containing characteristic translocations, a correlation is sought between detection of viral DNA in Guthrie cards and the eventual development of leukaemia. This approach showed no association between infection with polyoma viruses (Priftakis et al, 2003), herpesviruses (Bogdanovic et al, 2004;Gustafsson et al, 2006), or parvovirus B19 (Isa et al, 2004) and childhood ALL.…”

Platelets: killers of parasites or patients?

“…5 However, a few recent studies concluded that platelets may have a direct role in killing Plasmodium parasites in infected RBCs. 6,7 This current study in Blood took a rigorous in vivo approach to show that although platelets drive an immune response to infection, they are unlikely to have direct protective in vivo parasite-killing functions. There are many potential reasons for the different interpretations, including in vivo vs in vitro study, data analysis approaches, and interpretations, as well as the types of parasites used.…”

“…Another very important factor is that we continue to better understand how platelets shape the immune response, and therefore, continue to gain a better understanding of how to best interpret in vivo platelet-related data. For example, the initial paper describing a potential direct parasite-killing role for platelets in malaria used an uncomplicated malaria (UM) model 6 in which the immune response to infection is very different than eCM immune responses. eCM models have significant platelet activation.…”

“…4,5 Even though epidemiological evidence proposes that ALL may be initiated by an in utero infection with a common pathogen, the identification of such a pathogen has not been made. [6][7][8][9] Unlike viral-specific methods, unbiased NGS can provide a holistic picture of the virome of ALL patients, thus facilitating identification of viral candidates that might lead to ALL development. The role of unbiased NGS in the study of the human virome has been notable during the past decade, aiding in the detection of known and unknown viruses from both isolated cases and from major disease outbreaks.…”